Children's automotive safety seats must meet many criteria and regulatory standards. However, it is not uncommon to find a safety seat providing good structural support while failing to provide measurable comfort to the child; this is because many of the safety design objectives often conflict with each other. For example, it is necessary to design the center of a seat with enough rigidity to provide proper support and withstand impact forces, while, at the same time, be compressible enough to offer softness and comfortableness.
In addition, most rigid safety seats that are designed similarly to this invention do not conform to all makes of automobiles. The backseats of automobile models are all different, i.e., the angle between the car seat base and the car seat backrest varies considerably from vehicle to vehicle. In order to avoid confusion, all references herein to parts of a seat pertain to the removable child booster safety seat, unless specifically identified as an automobile or car seat portion. Traditionally, rigid safety seats cannot conform to the various angles between the car seat base and the car seat backrest. Most rigidly designed seats, therefore, do not provide a stable support for the infant unless the angle of the child seat closely conforms to the angle between the car seat and the car seat backrest of the automobile.
These same differences in angle between car seat backrest and car seat base cause another problem for rigid seat designing. Rigid seats which do not closely conform to the car backseat angle require greater seatbelt extension, since the seat projects further away from the contour of the car backseat. This greater seatbelt extension is undesirable from a safety standpoint, since passenger safety is inversely proportional to the distance of a seatbelt from its anchor point.
The dichotomy entailed in meeting both safety and comfort criteria is also evident in the design of the child seat's side supports. The structure of the seat must have side mouldings for enveloping and supporting the occupant against lateral forces. Side supports, however, often prevent seatbelt straps from fitting snugly against the child occupant. In addition, highly prominent side supports obscure a child's view.
Many designs exist for child safety seats that are rigid, owing to the fact that very few are capable of fulfilling all of the design and safety objectives. Most of the seats represent compromises between conflicting objectives. In other words, structural differences are often adjusted to produce a tolerable solution; the importance of one criterion is reduced in order to bolster a seemingly antithetical criterion. This type of concession, however, does not effect excellent design.
The present invention is a child booster seat for an automobile that offers outstanding performance, despite the many conflicting design objectives.
The present invention meets the stringent Canadian standard of compressibility, which requires that the seat compress less than one inch under a force of five hundred pounds. Despite the rigidity and high density required to meet this strict standard, the child booster seat of this invention is also soft and comfortable. Conflicting safety design objectives are not compromised by the invention. The invention incorporates a central core of rigid, high-density foam to provide support. The rigid core is then overlaid with a thin layer of soft, compressible foam for comfort.
The rigid booster seat of this invention provides the best design features of both a flexible seat (as illustrated in U.S. Pat. No. 5,125,717) and a rigid seat (as shown in U.S. Pat. No. 4,726,086). One of the major drawbacks of rigid seats is that they cannot conform, as aforementioned, to the various angles of different automobiles. This is basically a problem of the child seat's stiffness. The rigid booster seat of U.S. Pat. No. 4,726,086 can provide a change in angle only by its back portion being hinged to its seat portion.
The present invention, however, allows the seat to bend about the intersection between the automobile's backrest and car seat base without the need for hinges. Normally, only hinged designs could provide such flexibility at this intersection point. However, this flexibility was never before possible with seat designs that were substantially rigid, such as this invention. The problem for the designer of this invention was how to provide, without a hinge, both rigidity and flexibility. This is no easy task. Adding flexibility to a rigid design is contrary to its original purpose, as is adding rigidity to a flexible design. Therefore, the current invention reflects an achievement not obvious to the skilled practitioners in this art. By adding rigid materials to the backrest, the invention maintains the rigidity required for the child seat. The invention, however, allows the backseat to bend with respect to its seat base by designing the intersection between the backseat and seat base with flexible foam. In this manner, the need for a mechanical hinge is negated. This one-piece design has many advantages, including an improved degree of safety and a lower manufacturing cost.
The current invention also features side supports that cushion against lateral forces and movement, while allowing a seatbelt to fit flush across the base of the seat. The side supports are also designed with a low profile, so that the child has a wide field of view. These side supports are rigid enough to provide support, but soft enough to give the feel of a flexible design.
Another dynamic of comfort is provided by this wide field of view. A child who can see is usually one who is less likely to wriggle or whine.